Staff Farewells
As 2020 closes, we would like thank and farewell members of Clonard staff who are retiring or moving into different chapters of their lives.
Thank you and good luck.
Kylie joined us in in 2014 from MacKillop Werribee to join the Leadership Team as Assistant Principal, Pastoral Care. With her considerable experience in supporting students with extra needs, she threw herself into pastoral care, student management, leading the counselling staff, the year level coordinators and all dimensions of student support, including revitalising the VCAL program.
Not content with those challenges, Kylie has also been our inaugural Child Protection Officer and responsible for the significant workload that goes with senior leadership and she has been central to leading the college through its growth and development of the recent years. Of particular note is her work on building the capacity of the classroom assistants and the counsellors and, with the building of The Brigidine Centre, the impressive integration of services in the new Student Services Centre. This has gone alongside her leadership and enormous work on the Wellbeing program. This has entailed her introducing Respectful Relationships, Positive Education in concert with Geelong Grammar and our own Wellbeing curriculum that she has tenaciously pursued, leading many teams to produce a powerful program for each year level.
This work, passion and leadership has put Clonard in a place where we seen as the leaders in this area and having the capacity to support student learning and wellbeing in a properly integrated way. All through this Kylie has taught Health, PE and Wellbeing and been a model of how to be a teacher with high standards generating high levels of respect from her students. It has been wonderful to see her model how to teach with passion while ensuring students learn the knowledge and skills to make them effective and resilient learners for their lifetimes.
The many students who have been touched by her compassionate care and the staff who have learnt with her and been entertained and supported by her, say a fond goodbye s she leaves to take up the position of Deputy Principal of Iona- it is their gain and our considerable loss. Goodbye Kylie, and all the best with the new challenges and thank you for your great contributions to Clonard over these past seven years.
We say a sad goodbye to Ritva who retires this year after an impressive 30 years of dedicated service to Clonard. Ritva came to us as a laboratory technician from CSIRO and quickly settled to getting our Science labs in order and preparing experiments with teachers. Ritva has also had extensive experience documenting and managing our hazardous materials registers and more generally in OH&S.
We have benefited so much from her knowledge, her attention to detail and from her care for the labs and of the students and teachers she has worked with. What you may not know is that the very magazine you are reading now was produced by her in the 1990s.
Many editions of Reflections exist as a record of her hard work with groups of students to produce a thorough and creative record of the highlights of the Clonard year. We thank you for that Ritva and for all the other things you have done to support our science and environmental programs at Clonard over these 30 years: we already feel your absence from the labs and from the staffroom. We wish you well and good health in your retirement.
We have so much to be thankful for having Chris as such a vibrant and valued member of our community and we wish her well in her well-deserved retirement.
Chris has a very long career at Clonard to celebrate, having notched up 37 years as a teacher of Health, PE and RE. After Chris migrated to Geelong she found work here at Clonard, teaching Health and PE. Many students over many years remember Chris fondly as a teacher who worked hard to get them physically active but who cared about their wellbeing before it was so fashionable to do so.
Her students also remember her as a legendary Year 7 homeroom teacher who always encouraged them to take responsibility for their actions and for their learning and to take leadership in the classroom. Chris was also instrumental and central to our involvement in many, many inter-school sporting teams, while she has also led and supported the house sporting activities as well. Some years ago, Chris introduced the subject SportsFun to years 9 and 10 and, over the years, many students have benefitted from teaching team sport to primary school students- most often at Hamlyn Banks Primary. This was a most successful program and a great way for Clonard to be represented in the local community.
After taking a year’s leave to explore another career area, Stef has indicated that she will not be returning to Clonard. We are really disappointed for us but very happy for her having a new career direction to pursue. Stef started work at Clonard in 2014 as a beginning teacher, employed to teach Art and RE. Despite being new to teaching, Stef soon showed students and the staff who worked with her that she was assured, knowledgeable and good at teaching.
Her students will remember her for her interest in them, their learning and their wellbeing but they will also remember her interest in all things style- buildings, fashion, design and people. Stef proved herself a very capable visual Arts and RE teacher but she also proved to be an impressive wellbeing teacher, sensitively guiding and supporting the students in her care. She leaves a significant gap to fill at Clonard and we wish her all success on this new page of her working life.
Michael joined us in 2018 as a member of the ICT team and quickly established himself as a great team player and a man who was very knowledgeable about all aspects of the mysteries of IT. He also proved himself to be most obliging on the Helpdesk and keen to assist both staff and students when they visited or made contact.
There are many, many staff and students who have stories of being saved by Michael and so it caused us some concern earlier this year we learned that he was to be ‘stolen’ from us to help form the emerging ICT team at Iona College. Michael has made a big impact in the little over two years he has been with us but we are sure he will become central to the life of those in his new environment.
All the best, Michael, and thank you for the faithful service and all the tips and tricks.
John came to Clonard at the start of 2019 to teach Literature and English to our senior students and finished here at the end of first semester this year. While he has only been here a couple of years, he has made a tremendous impact on the students he has taught. They have spoken of him as an engaging and creative teacher who really got the best out of them. He has managed to spread his love of language and literature here and we are sure that some of it will take root and flower. Thank you, John, for your passion and commitment for the subject areas and applying it to teaching and inspiring our students.
Lil has been with us teaching Art, Humanities and RE since part way through 2010 and, unfortunately for us, she resigned earlier this year to take up a job in a Melbourne school. We will remember her for her laugh, her great smile, her stylishness and for the passion she brought to her work and to her relationships.
Being a practising artist, Lil also brought that artistic flair and experience to her work with students and with staff and for that we are very grateful- her version of the oak tree that is on the graduate outcomes posters in the school is a ready testament to her art and her skill. Thank you, Lil and we wish you all the best with your continuing career.
We wish Madeline Smith and Anthea Hinchey all the best as they take 12 months leave in 2021.
We would also like to acknowledge and thank Prudence Anderson and Joanna Wiltshire for their contributions to the College as they finish up their contracts with us this week. We hope to see them again sometime soon.
